Unrivaled by Alyson Noel
Published May 10th 2016
Everyone wants to be someone.
Layla Harrison wants to leave her beach-bum days for digs behind a reporter’s desk. Aster Amirpour wants to scream at the next casting director who tells her “we need ethnic but not your kind of ethnic.” Tommy Phillips dreams of buying a twelve-string guitar and using it to shred his way back into his famous absentee dad’s life.
But Madison Brooks took destiny and made it her bitch a long time ago.
She’s Hollywood’s hottest starlet, and the things she did to become the name on everyone’s lips are merely a stain on the pavement, ground beneath her Louboutin heel.
That is, until Layla, Aster, and Tommy find themselves with a VIP invite to the glamorous and gritty world of Los Angeles’s nightlife and lured into a high-stakes competition where Madison Brooks is the target. Just as their hopes begin to gleam like stars through the California smog, Madison Brooks goes missing. . . . And all of their hopes are blacked out in the haze of their lies.
This book just wasn’t for me. For the most part, there wasn’t really anything “wrong” with it but it just wasn’t that great. The concept was cool but I felt like the writing style was lacking something. I can’t really think of what it was lacking but it was just… plain.
I was pretty disappointed in the characters. They didn’t have a lot of depth and, like the writing style, plain. To be honest, after page 13, I wasn’t into this book at all. Layla was the first character we meet and she describes her boyfriend to have the perfect body and all that and she also says she “couldn’t imagine what he saw in such a pale and cynical slip of a girl like herself.”
I’m so sick of authors writing these perfect male characters and girls that don’t see their own self worth. Why is it so hard to write female characters who are confident? I could go on go about how writers need to start creating better female characters.
Overall, I just wasn’t a fan of this book. I didn’t like the writing style or the characters. I was kind of bored through out the whole book and I just couldn’t get into. I can see how less critical readers might enjoy this book (If I had read this when I first started reading YA, I probably would have liked it) but it just wasn’t for me.
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